Network Overhaul

Hi Guys,

I am planning a complete reworking of our lan/wan. It's going to be a huge job in which I will probably have a few vendors come in and pitch. I just want to get a rough idea of what I shoud be going for here. Currently I have a 4507 as my core switch, a 3745 as my wan router and 6 remote offices. four are using 837 routers over adsl, 2 are using 1750s over 512 frame. the remote offices vary from 3 people to 50 people.

We are doing standard things over the wan, email, file services, printing, want to get into video conferencing.

I am curious as to what sort of equipment i should be looking into. should i be looking to replace the 4507 or the 3745 with something larger? say something in the 6500 family for the switch? or just something newer and not necessarily larger? what about the outlying routers? i know the equipment i have, i am just unsure of what i should be looking for, for a major upgrade in speed and something that will last for a good number of years and be able to handle growth.

I know this is a lot of info, hope someone can give me some advice.

TIA,

ST

Susetechie,

Seems like you've got quite a big network to take care of - you should consider yourself lucky to be able to play with all those bits and bytes running through your Cisco powered network

Before you start upgrading any equipment, its a good idea to sit down over a long cup of coffee and consider your needs, existing network condition e.g bottlenecks, network hosts per subnet / vlan, file servers and the rest - to help you determine the areas which require the most attention.

This will help you considerably not to come to incorrect conclusions and simply start pointing at equipment to replace.

For example, before you even consider replacing that whopping 4507, I'd like to know what supervisor engine you have, the IOS on it, if you've got redundant engines, power supplies, the type of switching blades its carrying - how many people are connected to it and what are their requirements ?

This is just one point I'm touching on. A 'start from scratch' approach would be to look at the network in full, including users, servers and whatever else makes it up and then break it down slowly until you come to your backbone.

By identifying your access layer (users), you'll be able to slowly move up to the distribution layer (building switches) and then finally your core layer (by the sounds of it - your 4507:> ).

If you can provide more information about the network without exposing critical information, it will help us get a better understanding on what we are dealing with here and then suggest upgrade paths.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,